by Fiona Hook | Feb 2, 2022 | Music, Uncategorized
I’m an opera critic. I’m not there to enjoy myself. So I always feel a little fraudulent when a trip to the opera presents an evening of pure pleasure. David McVicar’s 2006 staging of Figaro, the opera’s 1786 setting transposed to a country house in 1830, is... 
by Music Editor | Nov 27, 2021 | Music
By Robert Thicknesse How do you turn a Hammer horror into a tragedy? It confronts every director of Verdi’s take on Shakespeare. Part of it is that the mid-19th century had such different ideas of drama (and of Shakespeare) from us, another that Verdi (and his... 
by Alexandra Coghlan | Dec 15, 2018 | Music
Now brush your teeth The Royal Opera’s brief to director Antony McDonald was simple: create a production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel that does for Christmas opera what The Nutcracker does for ballet. His answer is picture-postcard pretty – a nineteenth-century,... 
by Alexandra Coghlan | Sep 26, 2018 | Music
Freia tonight Broken promises and uneasy alliances, cunning plans and cynical solutions, a played-out regime clinging to power while rivals snap hungrily at their heels: no wonder the Ring Cycle is the only time you ever see British politicians at the opera.... 